Coverity Scan Discovers Vulnerabilities in the Android Code

The 2010 security report looks at more than 291 projects, with special focus on the Android 2.6.32 kernel

Since 2006, Coverity has worked with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to identify software security vulnerabilities. In 2010, Coverity analyzed more than 61 million lines of open source code from more than 291 projects, including Android, Linux, Apache, Samba and PHP. According to the Coverity Scan 2010 Open Source Integrity Report, 45 percent of the identified vulnerabilities are considered "high-risk defects". The report also says that little has changed since 2008 in software development testing to help identify these security concerns and goes on to say, "It also demonstrates how easy it is to make these types of coding errors when the human factor comes into play."

This year's report takes an in-depth look at the Android 2.6.32 kernel and says that HTC Droid Incredible has about half the defects that would be expected for similar software of the same size, with about 1 defect per 1,000 lines of code, 359 of them in the currently shipping version of the HTC Droid Incredible. The report points out the fragmented accountability for Android software development, saying, "Android is based on Linux, which has thousands of contributors. Compound that with the Android developers from Google, the contributors to Android from the larger development community, and OEMs that supply components for specific configurations of Android to support different types of devices, and the lines of accountability are quickly blurred."